One activity may engage your brain more than any other

That York Peppermint Pattie really can awaken your senses like the commercial promises.Hersheys/YouTubeYour brain fires for every reason imaginable — walking, talking, remembering what you went into that room for, even doing nothing at all.

But neuroscientists think one activity might activate your brain more than any other, and you do it every day: eating!

Dr. Gordon Shepherd, a neuroscientist at Yale, coined the term "neurogastronomy" in 2006 to describe how the brain creates flavors that make eating food pleasurable.

He told Tech Insider that creating flavor is one of the most complex tasks the brain does.

"Flavor engages more of the brain in relation to how it determines what we eat than almost any other behavior. If you think about swinging a tennis racket, or writing a paper, or even using a tool, it's a pretty focused use of the brain," he said. "But in the case of flavor ... you're engaging not only all of the sensory systems in the brain (vision, taste, smell, and even hearing) ... [but also] emotion, memory, language in describing to ourselves and to others the flavor, the motivations to eat. It's virtually the entire brain."

Music is another activity that neuroscientists have discovered triggers a wave of brain activity. It's interesting to see that some of the most enjoyable human activities can activate our brains in such a complex way.

But the field could possibly allow us to trick our brains into eating healthier or more sustainably grown foods one day. Understanding what flavor does to our brains is just one of the steps to unlocking that potential.